Welcome to the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Joy Pullman. I'm the executive editor
over here at the Federalist. Joining me today is Katie Faust. She is
a Federalist writer, longtime president of the nonprofit Them Before Us, and author
of the new book We'll be talking about raising conservative kids in a woke city.
Katie, Welcome, so good to be with you. I'm a fan
of the podcast, so I'm happy to be a guest. Katie, would
you start by laying out for our audience the core argument of your book.
Yeah, basically that regardless of whether you're in a red state or a blue
state, regardless of whether you're homeschool, private school, or public school,
your kids don't have to be victims of the culture. That's really what we're
trying to say is if you are very intentional about training your children, if
you are serious about replicating your values, if you prioritize in culcating your worldview
in your children with these specific strategies, your kids can actually be a force
for good. They don't have to be victimized. You know. I just
we my co author and I talk to people around Seattle, you know,
which is extremely hostile when I travel or do interviews elsewhere everybody has the same
question. Every single parent is asking the same thing, Like they see how
damaging and destructive these cultural narratives are, especially when it comes for the kids,
and they want to know how do we save our kids? And you
know, Stacy and I have in essence come up with some principles where we're
like, well, this worked for us, this work between our two families,
our seven children who are now between elementary school and college age, with
a variety of different personalities, boys and girls. And here's these timeless parenting
principle applied to our modern day moment that have allowed our kids to stand firm
when they need to sort out fact from fiction, be able to sniff out
the lie, push back against aggressive adults. And you know, we're midway
through this parenting game. It would be great if like all of our kids
were already adults with conservative you know, bona fides and raising their own families.
So there's a possibility that one of our kids could turn out to be
a Bernie Brow and we're going to eat some you know, major crow.
But at this point, you know, we've got kids that we are really
close to, like really close to our kids who are navigating their largely public
school experience with integrity and with their convictions firmly in the hand. So we
just kind of put it all together in a book because I think it's going
to I think it's strategies that every parent can apply, no matter what zip
code they live in. That sounds like a dream quite Frankly, parents have
a lot of anxiety now about our culture hostility to children. I was actually
just looking at poll data the other day that showed something like eighty percent of
parents were either concerned or very concerned about gender insanity affecting their kids in schools
and in the culture. So what are the strategies that you have in the
book for dealing with this as a family. Give people a taste of your
recommendations. Yeah. Well, first of all, we talk about, you
know, the book is called Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City, and
we have people say, don't call it raising conservative kids, call it raising
Christian kids, or raising same kids, or raising healthy kids. But the
truth is that it's not a book necessarily about you know, just anti woke
kids. But it's not just about what your kids are against. Like we
look at the gender ideology in the school, and we go, we don't
want that, we don't want that, Like everybody agrees, we don't want
that. Yeah, that's bombers. But you cannot just train your kids to
be anti gender ideology. You train them to before the best ideas by logical
ideas, economic ideas, historical ideas, ideas that are grounded in human nature.
We are teaching them to be for the best ideas. Those are not
new ideas. None of those ideas are new. The ideas that we are
teaching them to be four are the ones that we've already discovered to be leading
to prosperity and health and wholeness and flourishing and prosperity. And it's ideas that
need to be conserved. Right, So we're teaching our kids to be conservative
kids because we're teaching them to conserve the best ideas from biology, history,
and economics. So step one is not we're not reactionary here. We're not
training our kids to be anti left, anti woke, anti democrat. We're
training our kids to be for the very best ideas. And so we outline
what those ideas are specifically in chapter one. What are the specific ideas that
are most under attack right now that you need to teach your kids to be
four. Those are things like life, the idea of male and female being
different, and because male and female are different and equal and distinct, therefore
marriage, marriage as the institution that unites the two people to whom children have
natural right. They need to be for and understand the distinct parent child relationship.
Right that's under attack. Children have a right to their parents. Parents
have a right to their own children. Race, understanding a proper idea about
race, Understanding and preserving our founding principles, Understanding the goodness and the morality
of the free market system. Right understanding freedom of conscience and freedom of religion,
and why it is that those ideas are so good and need to be
conserved. So we begin chapter one talking about like, these are the ideas
that are most under assault that in this particular cultural moment you need to be
especially aware of and attuned to, and start really from the moment your kids
can speak, teaching them to be for these principles, and then throughout the
book we sort of talk about age appropriate strategies to introduce these concepts to your
kids, and the antidote or the Nemesis, I should say to those conservative
principles and kind of how do you balance that, you know, like sheltering
your kids versus exposing them. Right, So really it's just take these principles
and then we're going to talk to you about what to do in middle school,
what to do in high school, how to emphasize these things in elementary
school, and just a lot of practical ways to slowly hand your world view
off to your children. I'm listening to this as a parent, thinking do
you have lesson plans? I mean, you do have links and resources in
your book, but how exactly do I go from? You know, thinking
as a mom, I like family in the free market. I think they're
great. How do you explain that to a six year old, a ten
year old, sixteen year old? Interesting because we do have a chapter two
in the book where like, yeah, there is a plan, there's a
training program. It's called parent. You actually are the program. You actually
are exactly what your child needs at every stage, because first of all,
you're the one that knows them the best. Right, you can tailor make
your educational program for your kids. You're going to know how to introduce these
concepts in ways that don't violate their innocence. You're going to know how to
introduce the distortions that the world is bringing to them and at what time.
And so we do recommend, like, hey, on these kinds of topics,
study these people on these kind of this issue, you know, the
parental rights, children's rights. Here are these resources we do talk about how
like we've sent our kids to a Worldview camp every summer, but that's one
week out of the year, Like you Worldview camp them the rest of the
time. There are books that will help you. There's camps that will help
you. There's programs and podcasts that we have been so blessed by, but
none of them replace parent like you literally are. Like, the bad news
is you cannot outsource this. The good news is you could never outclose this
to anyone that would do better than you. Okay, I'm a mom,
you know, I have six kids. I consider myself very involved in their
lives. But reading your book, it really was impressing. Up. It
seemed to me almost like that your ideas amounted to essentially homeschooling your kids on
the nights and weekends on top of their day schooling. If they're in a
public school. You know, you're arguing for reteaching them history and literature and
science, and the way things are going, reteaching them math too, and
then even teaching the harder subjects that you know are much harder than those basic
ones, like theology, anthropology, sociology. I mean, at that point,
it's kind of like, are you advocating for essentially reteaching your kids everything
at home while also sending them to a school that doesn't align with our family
values. Well, you've got eighteen years for this, and the good news
is that we've sort of broken this out in developmental stages, so you don't
have to do all at once. You don't have to do every topic all
at once, but once you know, once you're aware, Okay, here
are the principles that I need to be instilling in them at this age,
right, and here's the specific topics that I need to make sure that I
highlight for them. Right. You start instilling that in them, and then
you're going to find times, like we talk in the book about how like
reality is conservative if you look at the realistic world, the actual biological reality
of the world, about how humans exchange and trade and do commerce, and
especially grounded in the Christian worldview of like individual with human dignity. If you
look at first source materials for history, I mean the world is conservative in
terms of reflecting the conservative realities. Right. So you, once you are
instilling these different principles in your kids, the world is your classroom, both
in terms of saturating your children in the good, the true, and the
beautiful, but also in terms of highlighting the damaging and the destructive impact when
you take the world up on their offer for a lot of these woke ideologies
and what the world is telling them they should do with their bodies or with
their feelings, or with their money, or with the with the policy around
us or the you know, what are the outcomes to thinking about people primarily
as primarily defined as their race and or as oppressed or and oppressed. Right,
So the world is actually going to do a lot of the heavy lifting
or you once you have been able to really instill in your kids what it
is they need to be conserving. So it does sound overwhelming at first,
but this is really an entire philosophy that you're going to apply at different ages,
with different stages and a little bit different with each kid. Can you
give me a real life example of how this has worked in your own home.
Yeah good. So you know we really follow sort of ideologically, this
template somewhat follows the trivium approach that a lot of classical educators are going to
be familiar with, right, and it's really the natural learning stages that that
children follow. So the first stage is the grammar phase, right, where
kids are like sponges. It's not a critical thinking phase up until age like
ten or eleven. They can't really sort out fact from fiction. And so
in that stage, the most critical time that you're going to be using your
time is to saturate them in truth and beauty, true and beautiful, true
and beautiful. That is where the emphasis is. So you take all of
the conservative prince we outline in chapter one life, parent, child, male,
female, marriage, religion, race history. That is your time to
hit the true and the beautiful. Right. This is the phase where you
know everyone's like, oh, they're little sponges. You know they've memorized twelve
Alana verses. That's because they're actually wired to just take in the true and
the beautiful. Leverage it, baby, like, get in on that developmental
stage and just stuff them full of truth and beauty. And that's where I
mean, like, how do we do that? What does that look like
in our own lives? While we did take them to Ajuana, we did
put them in Sunday school class. But the other big life hack is they
listen to what we listen to. So, for example, all throughout their
kids, my kids elementary school years, I would listen to Ben Shapiro while
I cooked dinner on a speaker that everybody could hear. So they're coming in
and out, they get an hour of Ben Shapiro a day while I'm cooking
dinner, and now positive we're talking. But if they leave, or if
they're you know, doing something else or doing legos or whatever, they're listening
to Ben Shapiro. They're listening to his cultural analysis this right, they're listening
to the Breakpoint podcast, which to me is the best Christian worldview podcast out
there that teaches them to look at things from a Christian perspective. And so
lots and lots of truth and beauty for your kids in elementary school. Then
when they get to middle school, that is when we introduce the distortions to
the true and the beautiful. That is when I think, you know,
in our book, we just say this is when you now the main goal
has moved away from teaching them the basics, the true, and the beautiful,
now that you're going to show them the distortions that the world is going
to tell them about life, about man and woman, about marriage, about
the founding of our history, about our country, about economics. Right,
and it's not that they haven't heard these things before, because they have.
That is when you actually give them sort of a matrix download of I am
now going to give you a full education of what abortion is. We're going
to talk about abortions. We're going to talk about surgical abortions. We're going
to talk about the arguments of why people say that they need abortion. And
when they're ten years old, though, I mean, I thought you said
late elementary, so I was trying to think what is the youngest that might
mean once they get to middle school. I will tell you, though,
that there are some elementary school kids who are ready for this. And I'll
tell you how you know, because you'll see your kids, like we've watched
all four of our kids go from regurgitating what we tell them and in essence
just mimicking what we say, whether it's Jesus is the only way to Heaven
to you know, all babies deserve, they have life or whatever it is
that we've saturated them in truth and beauty. So then suddenly they go,
but what if we're bron But what if somebody needs abortion? Right? Then
they start to question what you've told them. And at this point a lot
of parents kind of freak out and they're like, oh, they're rejecting their
faith. But actually, what you've just observed is that your kids have moved
from the grammar phase to the logic phase. Right. They've moved from the
phase where they're going to sponge up unquestioning whatever an adult that they really like
is telling them. They've moved into the developmental phase where they are now ready
to critically think through what you have told them. And so that is not
a moment of panic. That should be a moment of joy for parents,
where they go, Aha, it's time to get into it. And so
for our first child, we actually did. Before she went to public middle
school for the first time, I spent the entire summer just making her an
expert on homosexuality, doing what I could to make an expert on specialism.
No I'm serious, right, we talked about the change. She was a
very young sixth grader, so she was not quite she had just turned twelve
when she was going in. But she's also a first child and the girl
you know, so you can handle it. It's very cerebral, and so
that was my goal. I was like, you're going to know more about
this than at least all of your friends, and you'll know enough so if
your teacher lies to you, you can be like, I think she's be
asking me, I'm going to go home and ask my mom. So with
our first child, it was very intentional kind of boot camp. Like the
rest of the kids sort of got it as a trickle down effect, right,
because they heard me talking to these things with their siblings. My youngest
child, I never had a conversation with him about transgenderism, but when his
teacher told him in third grade boys can wear dresses, he thought, my
mom knows something about this. I heard her talk about this, right,
And so that is sort of the benefit of older siblings is you are talking
about it in ways that are not innocence violating, and that's one of the
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Com today. As a parent, I do have some concerns about that.
You can't always control what your kids are exposed to, of course, but
you can control I think a lot of what your kids isosed are exposed to,
especially when they're younger. And the line, you know is for different
families and different kids. But I do think it's better if a child doesn't
have to be exposed to, say, you know, a transgender sexuality when
he's eight, let alone seven or six. Now you're kind of in a
cultural war zone there in the Seattle. But if kids can be protected from
that kind of hostility until they're older, I think that's better for them.
And so you talked about getting to your kids before the culture gets to them,
you know, but if they're being got to by the culture, you
know, because they're going to a public school, they're having all the super
early exposure to really harsh things, it sounds to me like, you know,
parents would be aggressively mentally deflowering their own kid's innocence. Is that really
what you're going for? So, you know, what we talk about,
how your main job is you do want to filter out distortions in your kids
world as much as possible. You filter out the distortions. Now, when
we say saturate them in true and beauty, the truth and the beautiful,
you're talking with them about truthful things that they see in their world that might
come to them or that they might bump into. So I'm not saying that
we don't talk to them about the Holocaust or slavery. Actually that's part of
the true things that we expose them to. But we're going to filter out
the distortions. So as much as possible, we're not going to have them
in an environment where they are being evangelized about transgenderism or socialism or abortion or
whatever. And so we talk about how as much as possible you need to
filter out those distortions in their life. So, if you do have a
teacher who's very aggressive about promoting these kinds of things, as much as possible,
filter them out. As for a transfer, if you've got a find
another teacher, if you've got an extended family member right who is trying to
evangelize your kids in a progressive worldview, you have that conversation and you say,
you know what not comfortable with you talking to my kids about defunding the
police, or Black Lives Matter, or you know, your support for Bernie
Sanders or whatever it is. Please have those conversations with me and not my
child. And generally people respect that, and if they don't, you filter
that person out, right. So it is your job and as much as
possible to filter out the people the distortions, especially people that are seeking to
evangelize your children into those distortions. But I will tell you this, it
is critical that you get to your kids first. Now, when I say,
you know, get to your kids first, I'm not saying let me
explain to you what's happening in this pornographic video. What I am saying is,
hey, honey, there's a lot of screens in your role, and
you're saying to this year seven year old, there's a lot of screens in
your world. Sometimes on those screens there's pictures of naked people and it's really
yucky, and that's called porn. If you'll ever see that, you can
come and let mommy know. That's what we're saying, right that you need
to be the first person to talk to your kids about these things. Not
in a way that violates their innocence, but in a way so that they
know, my mom knows about this. And here's why. Because the first
person to talk to a child about subject, especially an uncomfortable or challenging subject,
they automatically will consider the expert. So if you are not talking with
your seven year old or eight year old about porn, and the first time
they see it is when they're at the playground or somebody's house and a kid
sticks a cell phone in their face of porn and they've never heard their mom
or dad mention it or give them a heads up that that could exist.
Three weeks later, when they're like, what was that? Where did that
come from? Who do they go ask? Right, research says they're going
to go back to the source that first introduced it to them. They'll go
back to the kid that had the cell phone. They'll say, where did
you get that? What's that? What is that? And so that is
why we have to be the first one to tell our kids the truth that
these kinds of things exist. Do we major on it, No. Do
we tell them graphic details. No? Do we say some people think that
men can marry other men, and that's not true because our body don't fit
together like that a man's body and a woman's body fits together. So that's
just something that you might hear out there, but you know that's not true,
because our bodies tell us what's true about ourselves. That's what we're talking
about in terms of getting to your kids first. We're not talking about like
we are going to go you know, we don't need to go into the
sixteen nineteen project and all the different lives they told about American history. You're
just going to say, you know, some people don't think that this country
was founded on principles of liberty and equality, and those people are wrong,
right. Some people think that we are founded on you know, keeping people
oppressed, and that's not true. If you ever have questions about history,
your mom and dad know a lot about this, you can talk to us.
So that's what we're saying. That makes it a lot simpler. It's
not like then I'm giving them a lecture with bullet points to your point about
porn on the phone. You know, we've told our kids just never look
at other people's cell phones. There can be yucky things on there. I'm
not telling them what kind of porn they can find on there right, but
talent informing them that's a danger zone for them. The left understands that.
We call that the founder's principle, Like, whoever tells the kids first,
they automatically considered the expert. The left understands this, like why do you
think there was such a huge freak out over the parental rights bill that don't
say gay bill? Why were they freaking out about that? Because they understand
that if they get kids first with graphic information, with sexual indoctrination, the
kid will then think, Okay, this is a subject that my school knows
about. This is something my teacher knows about. And so the other side
understands how important the founder's principle is getting to kids first, and that is
why they absolutely lose it when we talk about restricting their access to talk with
kids about these topics so they know the reality of it. You need to
know the reality of it, and you need to use it for your advantage
and your kid's advantage by in as much as possible giving them a heads up
as to what the world is going to throw at them. And then they
will have you as a refuge. They will immediately turn to you, or
they should turn to you when they do hear about abortion, or when they
do hear about you know, critical theory or whatever that you know, the
black lives matter. So where do peers enter your understanding of how child development
works. I don't know if you've heard of the research encapsulated in Judith Rich's
book called The Nurture Assumption. Her groundbreaking synthesis of research points out, for
example, that immigrant kids almost always adopt the culture of their peers over that
of their families. Once they grow up. The kids basically have a home
persona and a school persona, and they eventually adopt the persona that they try
out at school away from their parents, such a persona that's strongly affected by
peer approval as opposed to being strongly affected by a parent approval or teacher indoctrination.
So especially, she shows once the kids move past middle school, peers
are way more influential on kids than adults like teachers and parents. So I'm
wondering how your approach reflects this effect that shows that maybe parents best chance of
influencing their kids isn't in lecturing them, but actually in choosing their peer group.
Really good, So you know, are moving on through the Trivium right.
The grammar stage is the truth and beauty stage, where you are just
stuffing them full of what is true and beautiful. The logic stage is largely
middle school, where you're introducing them to the woke worldview, all the distortions
to the conservative principles that you've laid out in the elementary school years. What
are you doing in high school? You're staying connected. Like a lot of
people think, okay, high school is the time when I'm really going to
drill down. High schools the time where we're going to really prepare for this.
High school as the time when things are going to get really intense.
But actually, no, high school is the time when, according to the
trivium, that's the rhetoric phase. That's where they're speaking and articulating and learning
to work out in real life what they believe. And so, in our
estimation, your job there is not teaching, like you're not telling them,
honey, this is right and wrong and oh this is what the world's gonna
throw at you at that point, all of that should be in a race.
Your job is to stay connected, like you function now as a consultant,
so they come back to you if they have questions, and so I
think that those peer relationships become so dominant because a lot of times parents think,
I can back off now. And that is true when it comes to
making their sandwiches, or doing their laundry, or teaching them right now off,
but it absolutely is not true in terms of connection. That actually is
the time in a high school where you have to be hyper aware of staying
connected to your kids, because they already know what they believe, and there
are a lot of pressures from their teachers, from their friend group, on
social media, whatever they're seeing. And we talk a lot in the book
about how this worldview transmission is totally moot if you're not connected to your kids,
if you don't have a relationship with your kids, and so we give
some strategies about how we've personally done that in high school. But it's interesting
that you talk about that sort of split persona because we wrapped up the book
by asking our seven children to give their final word, like what advice would
you give to parents who are raising kids in a hostile culture? And we
didn't let any of our kids read the book before they wrote. I think
I only just copy you, I know, but I think my thirteen year
old is the only one that's read the book so far. My teens or
whatever. Mom, we heard it all. But my oldest daughter who is
now going to be a junior in college, who is a junior in college
right now. She said, you have to be very careful because kids,
you have to make sure that they're not living a double life because the cultural
poll is so strong and it's very very easy. And now having a phone
kind of enhances that double life effect because you can carry your double life into
your home, you know well. And she said, you've got to be
so connected to your kids because, especially in a place where there's this level
of cultural pressure to form, it is so easy to act one way at
school and one way at home. And she's the one that said, my
dad was really good about this. He would find ways to connect with us
through drawing and Ryan, my husband, once they got to once they get
to high school, he just schedules a breakfast with them every week they have
a Saul Day, but they always go out with him and it's no agenda.
He's very teaching this is right, this is wrong, and he just
he really learned, no agenda. We'll bring our bibles we'll read some but
I won't talk. He'll just sit and let it be silent, and then
the kids will start talking, and it's just this time for them to kind
of purge and say whatever. And he has practiced now what we call the
no flinch rule, Like we've got a whole chapter in the book called no
Flinch, Like, your kids say things to you that you go, what
the hell? I don't think getting me? Like, that's the response that
we have because it's natural, because the world is because they're experiencing things and
seeing things, asking questions and observing things that you're like, there's a sixth
culture, why are they doing this to my kids? But he has kind
of cultivated the no flinch face, which is harder for him than me,
by the way, where they us. So it's so critical because you cannot
do this. You cannot inculcate your values in your kids if there are barriers
in communication between you and your kids. And one of the biggest barriers if
them going, oh my gosh, if I have to wade through my dad's
absolutely eruption in this like why you and bother, I'll just google it,
right. So one of the best ways to make sure your kids want to
come to you. Is not freaking out, even if they say something to
you that freaks you out that you think is that illegal. I mean,
like, whatever it is that they say to you, no flinch. That's
not to say there's no emotion and there's no consequences. That is to say
that there cannot be an eruption because you just take it and stride. Yeah,
you have to condition your children to associating talking with you, confessing to
you, disclosing too with relief. They have to think, man, this
is awful, but I always feel better after I talk to dad. That
is what you want, and I think that's probably the answer to the double
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of the answer. I also think, I know you can't control your kids'
lives, but encouraging them get to use a dumb phone instead of a smartphone
if they have to have one signing in you know that pledge to at least
wait till eighth grade before they even have a cell phone checking in on who
they're talking to. Especially, you know, I would practically never let kids
just free into the wilds of the internet. There's too many predators out there.
That sort of thing. Judith Rich also argued that if you have low
status in your peer group, that can really wreckuse psychologically. It's just too
much pressure. Most people can't handle it. They can't keep their beliefs in
a really strong peer pressure situation. So in our culture, being a Christian
or a Conservative, that automatically makes you a low status person, and that
can pressure kids more than they can stand. You know, as we saw
with lockdowns, that's more than most adults can stand that kind of peer pressure.
So what are your strategies for helping insulct kids against that super strong peer
pressure to adopt a double life to get by at home in school, which
often leads to the kids abandoning their families beliefs once they're out on their own.
Yeah, the entire last chapter of the book is called Find Your People,
and it really is like, you know, three parts, three parts
to that chapter. Conservative adults need other conservative adults, Conservative kids need other
conservative adults, and conservative kids need other conservative kids. It is true that
in the isolation you will get plucked off so quickly and largely when our kids
are at public school. Because right now, all three of my oldest have
all done public school for high school. They very rarely have Christian friends at
their school, especially in their grade, but they always have people at church.
They always have a friend group at church. There's always a group of
kids that they know they can ask honest questions to, they can mock the
culture appropriately with those people. They are the other kids that are also not
wearing masks, or the ones that are not posting the black squares, or
the ones that have refused to do you know, so the walk out supposedly
against you know, school violence, which really is just an attack on the
Second Amendment. I mean, they always have other kids in their life that
they love and who loves them who are not playing along. So they have
a peer group that they can fall back on in their life even if there's
not a lot of them in their public school. Now, my kids have
friends at public school, like they've all made friends, but they have not
necessarily been friends that have agreed with them about the definition of the good.
And so it is very very important that your kids do have a friend group
know them completely and with whom they're totally known, and they can know them
both ways. Because you're right, the left has so perfectly as our friends
Della Morabido says, weaponized loneliness and ostracized you to a level where you'll get
social conformity just because you don't want to get canceled. So you do have
to create that social group so that if you're canceled at school, which I
think at some point, all three of my kids that have been in high
school, they have been ostracized by a teacher, shut down, kicked out
of a friend group, or demonized online or whatever it is, at some
point one or two times for standing up for something they believe in. They
always have their friends at church that are like, yeah, you nailed it.
They ran from you, they canceled you because they couldn't handle it,
because they didn't have the stones or whatever it is. Like, you do
need that peer group. So having grown up among evangelical Christians, you know,
I've been to myself to some of those Worldview camps that you recommend,
and they're really great. But you know, parents have been doing that sort
of thing, this kind of Sunday school Bible camps, Worldview training, buying
their kids the books, listening to Prager, you conservative clubs at school,
you know, all of that, but their success rate at transmitting their values
to their kids. It has really not been very good, even despite all
that effort to essentially do what you're arguing for the information saturation with their kids.
So what about your method is better than you know what these many parents
that I know, that we know from statistics generationally, you know, they've
been doing and it hasn't been effective. The slide continues, So, what
about your method is better than what already people have been trying that has not
been effective? Well, yeah, because we're not raising robots, you know,
we're raising people, and every single one of them is different. And
yeah, there's no guarantees. Right, I'm not saying you can, but
it does seem like the very low success rate for just the information approach ought
to be better. You know, I don't know if you've seen the Neemiah
Institute, which has surveyed tens of thousands of kids. They found that even
you know, Christian kids going to public schools, almost all of them eighteen
ninety percent have secular humanist assumptions. You know, they don't believe in objective
truth. They believe in doing whatever feels good because they've been exposed to that
propaganda for so long it's just the air that they swim in. Yeah.
Well, I remember I wasn't a Christian. I didn't grow up as a
Christian. Neither did my husband. We both were conferts late in high school.
And it's so interesting because I think back on my Christian friends back then,
and they would look at the church and they would look at their parents
and they'd be like, oh my gosh, they're backwards, they're anti science.
There's you know, I can't go to them with questions. It's the
school, it's the world. Those are the people that are smart, they're
educated, they're open. There. You know, that's where you're going to
find, you know, life as it's meant to be lived. And I
will tell you I don't know what it's like in other parts of the country,
but here, And I can say this with my kids. Stacy would
say this with her kids. But also I run the youth ministry at our
church right now. So I'm teaching the Sunday school classes and I'm leading,
I'm running the youth group. There's a lot of people that are helping.
But the world is nuts. And these kids look at I mean like really
like they see what I'm laughing because I agree with you. Yeah, And
so there's no illusion for them about what those premises are going to lead to.
They see how insane it is. They see how it's destroying their friends.
They sit with their friends in the nurses office because that kid got a
bad hit of marijuana and now they're having a psychotic episode. They see there
he's not dead. No, no, I'm not kidding. It's yep,
it's dire. And they see how dire it is. They know that their
friends who are identifying as pan this this week and buy this over here and
DEMI this, and how they have tried every sexual thing and they're on antidepressants.
Like, there's really no illusions about how what the fallout of these woke
ideas are in the lives of their friends. And then they come to church,
and this is the place where they can ask questions, and this is
the place they're getting answers that are actually that are coherent and that align with
the natural world that they're living in. This is the safe place, that's
the place where they can't get canceled. These are the people that genuinely know
them and love them and are not trying to coerce them into a certain person.
This is a place where they can ask honest questions, not their school.
They cannot be honest at school. They can't they you know, my
son, you know, well all of them at some point, but like
most recently, you know, he'll try to ask a question and it is
shut down. It is not a place for open debate. It is not
a place for an exchange of ideas. The church and the home has become
that. So in that sense, we do have a bit of a hack
in Seattle because the devastation is obvious. And I will say that like in
terms of this, I don't know if there's a secret sauce, but my
husband and I got to observe a lot of parenting philosophies up close and personal
when we were doing youth ministry before we had kids, and while our kids
were young and now kind of into the rest of you know, our high
school years. And we really do see two extremes in terms of the Christian
world. One extreme is uber sheltering, like you're never going to watch that
movie, You're never going to listen to that music. I won't expose you
know, it's only a sixth day creation. There's you know, there's just
nothing of you can't know about evolution law. And so those kids are like,
they're fine and their behavior has conformed. But then they completely fall apart
when they go to college and they are confronted two years old earth, you
know what I mean. But then you also have the parents. And we
saw this in the Christian world, or at least people bringing their kids to
youth group, that we're less a fair hands off what we would call today
like self directing, like child directed. The kid decides everything, no limits,
they know how much sugar they can have, they can determine their they
can determine their gender right, and there's no constraints. And those kids never
learned to manage themselves, you know, they totally fall apart. And so
we decided we're gonna shelter. We're gonna sorry, We're gonna shepherd our kids
through everything the world throws at them while they are under our roof. There
should be nothing once they leave the home, go to college, go move
out where they go. I've never heard this before. I've never considered this,
Well, this undoes my entire worldview. And so we actually, like
I said, have been intentional about saying, okay, if this comes into
your life through school or through social media. We'll discuss them with it.
Let's really figure it out together. I spent my son, my sixteen year
old, and I did a road trip like six hours in the car together
on Saturday, and we listened to segments five different segments of culture or with
Tim Pool, where he had on some wild guests that we're talking about some
pretty graphic things, you know, one on whether or not sex work should
be legalized. One on how to prepare men for the current dating market,
with two very different perspectives about how that goes. And you know, he
had people on there saying, yeah, men, you should have a body
count of at least fifty women before you get married, you know, right,
And and yeah, a lot of Christian parents fee like, oh,
but I'm like bring it, Like, can I see what you're saying?
First, I wouldn't intrud again, I wouldn't introduce that to my eight year
old. But you have a high school teenage boy, you know, that's
a totally different world. Yeah. But with my eight year old, I
would say, oh, did you see in that movie how you know he
was kissing her and taking her home and they're not married. Yeah, that's
not the kids, you know. They flagged that for me. My kids
know that strange. That's right, That's exactly how it should be. They
need to know truth and beauty. So when they see that, go,
oh, mommys and daddy. Who are the only ones that go to the
same bedroom at night? Not boyfriend's girlfriends. I've been talking with one of
my favorite Federalist writers, Katie Faust. She's a president of Them Before Us
and the author of the new book. We've been talking about raising conservative kids
in Awoke City. I'm Joy Pullman, executive editor here at the Federalist,
signing off with you don't forget to be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.